A team of international scientists in the US state of Indiana say they've been able to map - for the first time - the structure of the Zika virus. It's not quite the cure many are waiting for. But it does, they say, bring that cure one step closer.

This is what the Zika virus looks like. Up close, and magnified several times over. Thousands of images, never-before-seen. Now, grouped together providing scientists - for the first time ever - a map of Zika's structure and hopefully a tool to defeating it.

The team behind the discovery says the map can help answer many questions.

"The first step in a virus lifecycle is actually getting into a cell, and getting into a target cell, and getting into a cell that might create a phenotype, a difference, a disease. And so looking at the structure, we can begin to identify those regions on the violence that are responsible for the diseases that were seeing right now," said Richard Kuhn, director of Bioscience Center, Purdue University.

The Purdue team - co-lead by world-renowned scientist Michael Rossmann - says the discovery was made possible thanks to a new powerful neo-scopic microscope that's revolutionizing structural biology.

"This new instrumentation - only available over the last two or three years - has made it possible to obtain to use an electric microscope to obtain pictures of three-dimensional objects to resolutions where we can almost separate the individual atoms," said Prof. Michael Rossmann, Bioscience Center, Purdue University.

Individual atoms which control the chemistry, or how the virus acts. Understanding that, he says, is crucial.

Sun Lei, a Chinese post-doctoral student from Shandong province, is part of the Purdue team.

"When you have a structure of the viruses, for example, you can basically have some kind of idea which part of the virus can be involved in the infection process and based on the virus structure we can design some drugs to treat the virus in the future," he said.

Purdue's life sciences department has been allocated a quarter of a million dollars to continue its research. Chen Zhenguo - also, from Shengdon - says there's value in the journey.

"It's really a good opportunity for me to learn the advanced technology and to solve the international concerns. I'm really proud to be part of this, to solve the problem, to let us know much better of the virus in order to fight with it, with this virus," Chen said.

One of the most amazing things about this discovery is that it took only months of research. The team says the next step is to develop treatments. Now that they have the map, it's just a matter of finding the right directions.